The DnD Movie is Too Good

God, the paladin is so well done.

Cinematic adaptations of books are difficult to pull off. The two different media are very difficult to translate between. What makes a story good as a book frequently makes it a terrible movie, and vice versa. Games are this problem on a whole other level. Unlike a book, where there are hundreds of years of literary criticism to draw from for adaptational purposes, game criticism is a much younger form, with people still arguing there is no such thing as actually bad or good game design; obviously we have a ways to go yet! At least with the “thaT’s oNLy YOur opiNION” folks who say such silly things about stories and movies you can point at established schools and ask them to do some learning or get an adult. Modern game designers still have to contend with “you can’t figure out fun” people.

Is it any wonder that most game adaptations are so bad then? People are trying to ape events, without asking “How does the game make us feel?”, because nobody really has a popular framework to help them understand what’s actually important about the game they’re trying to adapt to a movie! Right, Prince of Persia???

The new DnD movie is a really good B movie. It knows it’s a B movie. It’s happy with its popcorn flick status and decided to really own up to this shtick! I wasn’t bored at any point. The characters are wonderful, the humor has a wide range, the fights are well thought-out, and the themes of the story are poignantly hopeful.

It’s not too often these days every character has an arc, no matter how small it is. “The team” each have an arc: Edgin has to learn how to actually be father material, Holga must learn to accept family outside her own tribe, and Simon and Doric together start learning how to be more for each other. None of this is masterfully crafted or anything, but given how frequently the fundamentals are ignored it’s a breath of fresh air to see competency in 2023.

No, I’ve not seen Across the Spider-Verse yet, why do you ask?

So, no, I’m not claiming DnD is a great movie, writing wise. Actually, I’m not claiming it’s great at any one thing at all!.. particularly the CGI. OUCH. Just ouch. Is it the same overworked and underpaid team of “not-slaves” CGI team worked to lichdom by Marvel? Cause if it is we’re gonna have a zombie uprising in a few years as more dewy-eyed artists get their souls ground into phylacteries. The displacer beasts particularly were embarrassing, not to mention that hand fight, which would have been better done by LEGO.

Fortunately the humor is really good. The Jarnathan gag particularly had me laughing, because it is exactly the stupid shit an RPG player would think of. None of the jokes were that modern cringe meta nonsense; I actually got to know people through their sense of humor, something I thought had died with Joss Whedon years ago. Even the freaking paladin was funny! As in he was actually possessed of a sense of humor and could troll as well as the rest of the cast… in his own way.

Now, despite my diatribe against the CGI, the actual fights and other set-pieces endeared themselves to me. Call me a sucker for effort but there’s actually some imagination here, particularly with the Portal Staff. 

I will break reality for this staff. Reality. You heard me.

Someone really sat down and blocked out the locations, really thought about what they could do with them that was fun, and decided "to hell with the budget, let's have fun!" So yes, I now I've been harping on that whole crappy CGI thing, but honestly I'd prefer that they try and do something fun with bad effects to a boring and pretty movie. 

Or, y'know, a modern Marvel movie, which is boring and ugly.

Honestly, the themes of the movie, the core message or whatever, is one of my favorite things about it. Edgin is the heart and soul of the movie, and I feel like they do a good job with him having to let go of what he wants and addressing what the situation needs. He's the cypher of the movie, and this is honestly where I feel that the film shines the strongest: relating it all back to him. The movie has a strong focus on "letting go and doing what's necessary, no matter how you feel about it" that actually does go into the poignant and genuine territory, without forgetting that this is a Wendy's thank you, and I didn't necessarily come here for some deep exposition on the human condition, but for badly-done Displacer Beasts. I got my Displacer Beasts, hey look there's some actual emotional genuine stuff! BONUS!!!

Oh, and I have to say this as a pally main: I love the paladin in this movie. He's all the best paladin mains I've ever met, all rolled into one, with an extra dosage of humor. Honestly, anyone who wants to know how to play a paladin needs to watch this movie, no matter the game you're playing. It's great to see my people get represented well.

So I had a good time.

But that doesn't make the DnD movie a good adaptation. Sorry.

Here's the deal: adaptations are good if you can take what works about the original thing and translate it to your new media. A movie can be well-done, but be a terrible adaptation, and vice versa... or you can be Lord of the Rings and be a deeply flawed trilogy of movies and a bad adaptation with a kickass soundtrack. One can argue that I presented subjective stuff and pretended it's objective, but I'm not talking about whether or not the film is enjoyable: did the moviemakers identify the themes of the source material and translate them, or not? Yes, or no? You can get an objective answer to that question, by and large. 

The DnD movie is a terrible adaptation of any modern version of Dungeons and Dragons, even 4e (which it is arguably the closest to).

For one thing, there's actually a fair amount of nuance to the characters.I played DnD a good ten years before jumping to other systems, and I never saw the particular kind of poignancy the movie does. And frankly, I doubt anyone has, and the reason is very simple: this particular type of emotional intimacy is very hard to do without either a group that's okay with an almost-unheard-of level of emotional closeness, or mechanics that can nicely steer you in that direction so you can skip the awkward warming up steps. I'm NOT saying you can't have a group pull it off, but literally everything in the game doesn't help you do it, and with that pile of "not helpings" it turns into "actively discourages".

Also, the combats are fun and fast! When has that ever happened in a modern DnD game??? I love the crap out of 4th, and it did intricate so well, but it wasn't fast. 5e doesn't have half the bells and whistles of 4e (and it needs them), but the actual mechanics for combat are (and this is me being extremely kind) boring as fuck. Roll. See if you did damage or if the fight was nullified by your spellcasters, do damage. Rinse. Repeat. Yawn. Check your phone... oh I got hit? Oh, I don't like that. Have no consequences? Cool, I'll keep checking my phone while the DM tells his story. I have no idea how the DnD writers, who clearly had written from their own RPG experiences, managed to get "fast and inventive and fun set pieces" from their time with any modern DnD edition. And the earlier editions don't even do combat as sport, they did combat as war and wouldn't have done any of these setpieces at all!

But the greatest "you clearly didn't get this from DnD" is the coherent theming. Look, folks, I've been a Burning Wheel GM for ten years. Burning Wheel is possibly one of the best games for building thematic coherence from table time... and even what they're doing here in this movie would be hard to pull off. At least with the Wheel there's a good possibility of it happening, provided you're intentional and all that. Burning Wheel can give you this kind of coherence easier than most, but it's still difficult. Short of railroading the holy shit out of all your players and doing the absolutely worst of trad gameplay it's almost impossible to get any real narrative coherence out of most roleplaying games, nevermind the mediocrity that is post-TSR DnD.

If this was a faithful adaptation of Dungeons and Dragons, particularly 5e, it would be a mostly lifeless mess of railroading from a burnt-out DM, characters that were a combination of bad pastiches and stupid jokes, and some of the least interesting fights you would have seen in your life. A faithful adaptation of DnD would honestly put the world to sleep and kill the brand. And that may not be a bad thing at this point, given that WOTC like hiring the Pinkertons when they don't get their way. Some fates are indeed worse than death. I don't even like Pathfinder but even I know they're a far worthier candidate... not to mention more accurate to the kind of story this movie tells.

Now, someone (probably everyone) will be reading this and going "Holy shit this is spiteful". You're not entirely wrong?  I do resent how the RPG with the biggest share of players on the planet is astoundingly mediocre. I do actively resent that most of what my friends call "campaign tales" is actually just a collection of player horror stories as they struggle with systems that clearly were not designed for anything other than shallow brand recognition, reaping the consequences thereof. I especially resent that a movie that's actually quirky and fun gets to be associated with something not quirky or fun, but is actively a drain on the mental health of more than a few DMs who are brave enough to try it (the number of DMs for 5e is dropping for a good reason). Whether we want to admit it or not, this movie is an advertisement for Dungeons and Dragons... and it feels nothing like this movie, at all. If this was actually a commercial you'd go "Oh, that's false advertising" and be pissed off with me. You can argue the back half of this post is way too spiteful, but you'd also have to then tell me the obvious isn't true: that they're trying tot tell you "our product makes experiences kinda like this". And I'm not really going to play ball with that. That's a level of doublethink I find unacceptable, and I had a short fuse on such things to begin with.

There are games that feel like this movie, and  the best fit is probably Dungeon World. If you like this movie and want to try out a roleplaying game go get Dungeon World and have a blast! Dungeon World is a good game and I wish you many sessions of fun stories with you and your friends. This movie does resemble the table play of real games! Really good games! They just happen to not be Dungeons and Dragons.

I genuinely love this movie. I plan to share it with my kids when they're just a tad bit older. But you know what I'm going to tell them?

"The title isn't right. They should have called it Dungeon World: Honor Among Thieves".

And then I'm gonna play Dungeon World with them.

And we'll laugh and have a blast.